Capitol Visitors Awash In Sea Of Thomas Sentiment

Hands in his pockets, his bald head sweating from the effort, he moved slowly on soft leather shoes down Delaware Avenue around the north end of the nation's Capitol.

Past the solitary man on the street corner shouting passages from the Bible, he and his wife, Berdie, supported each other walking up the stairs of the Russell Senate Office Building. Past police officers strapped and buttoned into blue suits, past the shining cars of congressmen and lobbyists, they walked.

Into the doors of the Senate building, into the sea of flashbulbs, of signs, of people shouting slogans, of teeming crowds that gave way only when you pushed them, of people handing out buttons, grim people in blue jackets wearing earpieces, tattered people asking for handouts, more tattered people just coming in from the cold, people waiting in line for hours just to get inside the hearing room, others craning their necks before television monitors to get a glimpse of the image of Judge Clarence Thomas and the hearing where he hopes to clear his name.

Into all this, Fred Pime, retired hamburger stand owner from Chicago, came at about 9 a.m., just to get a gander.

And what a sight it was.

Pime and his wife were among hundreds who packed the inside of the Senate building -- the vast majority of them Thomas supporters -- in hopes of witnessing a glimpse of the embattled nominee.

Some grew wide-eyed, while crowded around television monitors they heard Thomas's accuser, Anita Hill, say Thomas boasted to her about the size of his penis and his prowess in oral sex.

The hearing unfolded in the grand old Senate Caucus Room, whose polished marble walls probably hadn't seen this much excitement since Ollie North took the stand.

Before the hearing could begin, Thomas had to walk past supporters from the office of Sen. John C. Danforth, R-Mo., to the hearing room above. Supporters got only a glimpse of him, smiling stiffly as he and a tight ring of police officers pushed their way through the crowd.

About 200 women from a Maryland church, sporting "Pro-Woman, Pro-Thomas" buttons and chanting "Thom-as! Thom-as!" were lined up all the way down the hall to the hearing room.

Even after the hearing started the chanting continued, until Capitol Police Chief Robert Langley waded into the middle of them and shouted: "Ladies, you can stay, but you just can't chant!" Outside the heavy wooden doors of the hearing room, reporters had turned the hallway into a virtual studio, with makeshift utility poles that were hung heavy with wires running in and out of television monitors.

The ABC news pool grew impatient with people craning their necks in front of the equipment. They posted three "no loitering" signs on the wall.

There also were anti-abortion demonstrators, abortion-rights demonstrators and conservative black coalition group members.

There was Raymond Gibbs, a lawyer from Tennessee, who came to Washington six months ago to lobby against Thomas' nomination. Wearing an anti-Thomas button, Gibbs was at the edge of the crowd.

"This graphic sex stuff doesn't shock me," he said. "You see it in court all the time. It's typical in sex crime cases." Members of Phyllis Schlafly's conservative women's group, Eagle Forum, showed up, some wearing white pro-Thomas T-shirts: "Stand up for Dignity, Stand up for Thomas." "This issue here isn't Thomas -- the issue here is abortion," Schlafly said. "It's a last-minute lynching, and nothing more than a lot of radical feminists here who hate men and would like to destroy them." Nearby, a man wearing a three-piece suit who identified himself as Sam Smut handed out press releases announcing a new political action committee called Deviants for Congress.

"The only safe place in the country for sexual deviants these days is in the halls of Congress," he said.

Across the crowd, snatches of conversation were drifting.

"I think this is a damn shame," one woman from Texas told her husband. "Whoever said men were going to be perfect?" A woman in a gray smock who identified herself as Mary said she was irritated that the crowd was too thick to see the hearing.

"I come here all the time but I never seen nothing like this," she said, making her way toward the door. "This place is just crazy." It was into this "crazy place" that Fred Pime, once sole owner of Fred's Restaurant on the north side of Chicago, came with his wife -- "just because we wanted to see what was going on." "I'm just amazed at this place -- I've never seen anything like it," he said, he and his wife pausing near the front door of the Senate building.

He explained that he had never been to the nation's capital before, and didn't much like watching the news because of "all that craziness." Berdie Pime said they don't know what to think of Thomas, but that he seemed to be a nice man.

Neither of them stayed for the hearing, because it looked like too long a wait.